The Social 6: Key Stories from This Past Weekend, 7/30/12

As you may know, I’m a voracious reader and tend to share a good deal of news via my social platforms. Here’s a countdown of the top six most important articles I’ve shared in the last day. I curate this top six based on number of retweets, clicks, favorites, and mentions, so you guys are a large part of what ends up listed here :).

Y Combinator has invested in pretty impressive companies such as Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb, and more. But what about the ones that didn’t quite make it? Christopher Jackson of TNW talks more about the sites that should have made it and how beneficial they could have been! Thinkature and JumpChat are probably two of my favorites on this list, but there are plenty of good ones here.
Reddit, the social news powerhouse, had posts up dealing with rapists. Redditor started a thread asking for rapists themselves to comment, writing, “Reddit’s had a few threads about sexual assault victims, but are there any Redditors from the other side of the story?” In this article, Kate Freeman of Mashable also adds that a young college male admits to raping women by using alcohol and other tactics. These particular rapist believe they need to share their side of the story and sure enough they got the attention they aimed for. Personally, it’s a little hard for me to believe rapists have an outlet where they can share their side of the story without prosecution; I’d be perfectly fine if a self-admitted rapist gets prosecuted for their admission.
Over the last few months, Socialcam has begin picking up steam, and has streamlined the art of mobile video sharing. Spun off from Justin.tv in 2011, the social sharing platform allows users to upload, then customize videos  captured with iPhone and Android smartphones. Matt Petronzio of Mashable shows a virtual tour guide through Socialcam, which is yet another way companies can bring their brands to live using social media.
Bitly is now expanding  and playing around with a new service called Realtime. This new service is an Internet attention ranking engine, allows users to analyze what the world is thinking about right now. Drew Olanoff of TNW nicely explains more about how it works and its features! I think this is a very smart move by Bitly to continue to be relevant in the social marketing sphere.
This Saturday, the New York Times reported that Apple had been in talks for some time to acquire a piece of everyone’s favorite microblogging platform, Twitter. The article points out that both brands have (for now) stopped negotiations. While many industry sources feel that Apple shouldn’t undertake another effort to get into social media, Ian Kar of the International Digital Times argues that a formal partnership between Apple and Twitter would stand to benefit both companies greatly.
Does the internet give all ordinary people the power to be content creators? According to Vibhu Norby of TNW, he thinks if you do not know how to create a visual presence for yourself than google might as well not exist! Do you agree with him?

By jeremygoldman

social media pundit.

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